


Do I divide and fall apart?

by CrazyAngel



Series: Confessions of an Ex-Superhero [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt Klaus Hargreeves, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Panic Attacks, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 13:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20930726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrazyAngel/pseuds/CrazyAngel
Summary: Klaus keeps his head ducked, eyes trying and failing to focus on the carpeted floor. He feels like he’s been flooded with liquid nitrogen, he’s so cold. His hands won’t stop shaking, and his head pounds to the rhythm of “failure, failure, failure.”He thinks he’s going to be sick.Everything is a self portrait.





	Do I divide and fall apart?

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the song Jesus Christ by Brand New, and that good old theory that the reason Ben follows Klaus around is because Klaus had something to do with his death.

_And I will die all alone_  
_And when I arrive, I won't know anyone_

_Well, Jesus Christ, I'm alone again_  
_So what did you do those three days you were dead?_  
_Cause this problem's gonna last more than the weekend_

_Well, Jesus Christ, I'm not scared to die_  
_I'm a little bit scared of what comes after_  
_Do I get the gold chariot?_  
_Do I float through the ceiling_?

**(Brand New - Jesus Christ)**

Klaus Hargreeves is a bird in a cage with feathers wrapped around his neck so tight they strangle the song inside of him. They keep his song locked up in the hitched beating of his heart, the tremor in his voice, the tightness in his chest, the lump in his throat, the shaking of his hands.

Fourteen minutes inside that room, his back against the wall as the spirits scream and claw at him, and his entire body has become a black hole. Klaus has no beginning, no end, no grey area in between. He is nothing, floating in between the volley of their insults and the voices only he could hear. They’ve been screaming for so long. His brother, Luther, is tight lipped, arms limp by his sides, his brow creased. His father Reginald hurdles insult after insult, spittle laced with poison flying out of his mouth about the mission and into Klaus’s brain stem.

Luther counters.

His father screams, and screams, and screams. About his failure, about his uselessness, about how he refused to control his powers.

Everything is a self-portrait.

The mission early on the day, where he was supposed to be lookout, is one he wishes he could fast forward. He wishes that his life came with a remote controller, wishes that he could just pause those few minutes and step out of them entirely.

“I told you, Number Four, this the price. Now Number Six is heavily injured because you failed to do your duty. You have so much potential that’s wasted like garbage because you can’t stop being a coward.”

Klaus keeps his head ducked, eyes trying and failing to focus on the carpeted floor. He feels like he’s been flooded with liquid nitrogen, he’s so cold. His hands won’t stop shaking, and his head pounds to the rhythm of “failure, failure, failure.”

He thinks he’s going to be sick.

Everything is a self portrait.

“You can tell me anything, you know that,” Klaus hears Alisson whisper, as he sits on the chair beside his brother’s bed, but he feels none of it. His core is too rotten, his mind too dark, his heart swallowed up in a black hole.

“I know; I’m just fucked up right now. Sorry.” Klaus says and don’t look into his sister eyes for the next ten minutes. Ten minutes of stomach acid burning through his chest, trying to force itself out of his esophagus and he swallows it down. Again, and again, and again, he swallows down nineteen years of anger and hurt and bitter and not good enough and never good enough and fuckupfuckupFUCKUP.

He stopped cutting two years ago. He stopped cutting, but sometimes, his arm still itches with the need for it. He feels it under his skin, but he doesn’t wish he had a razor blade. He doesn’t want to bleed; he doesn’t want to die. He just wants to cope. He wants something, anything, to wash down the bitter, to sing him to sleep at night, to give him love he never had

He is so starved of love.

“Are you okay?” Diego looks Klaus up and down before the funeral, and no, no, Klaus is not okay, but he looks at Diego’s mop of tawny hair, at the ease in Diego’s eyes and knows that he could never spread his poison to Diego. He could never spit back the acid that burns him every day.

“I’m fine; it’s just a headache.”

Everything is a self-portrait.

Klaus Hargreeves is a liar. A liar, and a thief, and a fuck up, and a failure. He flushes years of failure down the toilet when he gets home, and he can’t look at his reflection in the mirror, can’t look himself in the eye. He can’t look the broken boy life in the eyes. He was supposed to be better, the model child Reginald wanted, but he is a liar who slaps a smile on his face every day and pretends that everything is alright.

He is a liar, a thief, a fuck up, a failure.

When Ben died, the sadness hits him like a bullet in the back. That’s when he realizes his only friends were the demons inside his head and the ghosts around the cold and lonely mansion.

“Klaus, are you in there?”

He barely registered the word coming from the direction of his door. He didn’t respond, too focused on the bag of pills in front of him, and how easy it would be to just reach over and dump it all down his throat. How he got it was really worth? Was worth having his body tainted and bruised and broken just for a couple of pills? He had been so fucking desperate, so desperate to forget that he just lost a brother, desperate to forget he had just been to his funeral and his father acted as if Ben was just another failed experiment, not a person, not his child.

He didn’t hear the person entering. He was too busy playing the scene over and over in his head.

He had said no.

He told them to get off, he’d screamed until his throat was raw and his face was drenched with tears. Why didn’t they stop? They kept kissing with a bruising force along his neck and collarbones as they forced themselves into the young, weak underaged boy.

“Klaus.”

He finally registered a presence when he was pulled into someone lap, and he realized it was Diego, his brother, holding him with the same care he once did when they were kids and Klaus would have a nightmare. He loved him. He loved him so much. He wished Diego would’ve been there, he wouldn’t let anyone hurt his brother. Right? He wouldn’t let anyone touch Klaus in that way, he wouldn’t let that happen if he knew.

“Klaus.”

It was one of the few times Diego talked softly to him, and suddenly he felt trapped when Diego slowly wrapped his arms around his waist; his breath got caught in his throat and he pushed himself onto the floor and started sobbing and shaking. Diego got up, alarmed at his brother state and tried to approach carefully, to pull Klaus back up the surface to sanity, but at that moment Klaus was too deep in the water for anyone to reach.

Not that Klaus wanted to come up, as it was almost a comfort, but at the same time he wants it all to end; the ghosts, the screaming, the training, the depression and numbness, the way he could always feel hands ghosting all over his skin, it wouldn’t go away, not even when he scrubbed his skin raw in the shower.

There are days he wakes up feeling like he’s wrapped in cotton wool. Locked away from the world, restrained by his own mind. Anxiety sits in the center of his chest, making his heart feel heavy, as though it’s sinking to the bottom. It’s weighing down on his lungs that contract with every labored breath, leaving him with the need to gasp, heaving breaths in the stale air. In his hear is the unreasonable urge to scream and the simultaneous sensation that he’s incapable of making a sound.

Today is the worst of it all.

He hears the creek of his bed and looks up to see Diego backing up slowly with his hands raised, and in one look in his eyes anyone could tell he had no evil intents, in fact he looked equally if not more afraid than Klaus. But that did nothing to calm Klaus nerves, it just pulled him deeper, his t-shirt is sticking to his skin with sweat and he’s pretty sure he must have had some kind of hallucination of Ben in the corner of the room, though he can’t remember more than a vague feeling of dread.

He breathes in.

As a reaction, his stomach lurches and he swallows, pressing his face into his knees stifle the urge to retch. He’s not sick. He hasn’t had enough to eat to be sick right now. Instinctively, he reaches out. His hand ghosts over the sleeves of his shirt, his nails leaving deep red marks on his skin but he doesn’t care. He looks up again.

The room is empty.

He wishes so hard this day never happened; he feels like crying. At the same time he knows he can’t, knows that his eyes would stay dry no matter how much he wishes to release his tension in violent sobs. Not that it’d be wise to do that, unless he wanted to add a headache to his list of complaints. He can hear the faint sound of people in the corridor outside his room, but his throat feels much too tight to call out.

Leaving the room to call for help feels like an incredibly daunting task. The creaking of the door makes him flinch slightly and then there’s a hand on his arm. Klaus keeps his eyes shut, merely shuffling closer to where the person is.

“Klaus, it’s Vanya. Are you alright?”

Vanya. Little Vanya, the person he least expected. Diego probably didn’t direct call her, they barely interacted with her anyway; she must’ve heard the commotion and came by her own will. It made Klaus want to cry even more, he didn’t deserve kindness coming from Vanya, his little sister whom was almost always invisible to their eyes. He shook his head frantically, labored breathing the only thing heard in the room as he curled in on himself in the hopes he would disappear, to sneak though the cracks and not be seen by his father or anyone, to just stop existing all together.

Fingers thread gingerly through his hair.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong, Klaus?”

A strangled gasp leaves Klaus’s lips when he tries to reply, letting Vanya pet his hair instead and reaching blindly for her hand “Shhh, it’s okay.”

“I-I don’t want to be here a-anymore, I-I-I want to-to die.” He choked out, just barely.

He’s too young to be this broken. He’s too young to feel like this, yet here he is sobbing his heart out like it could stop all the pain in his soul. Vanya slowly closed her arms around him, her chin on top of his head and he could feel her tears. Of course, she was crying too; what was he expecting? He must’ve looked really pathetic right now.

_Where are you, Klaus?_ he asked himself.

It was a game he sometimes played, ever since he learned about the theory of infinite parallels through one of Five’s old books, the idea that a person’s path through life wasn’t really a line, but a tree, every decision a divergent branch, resulting in a divergent you. He liked the idea that there were a hundred different Klaus’s, living a hundred different lives in infinite timelines.

Maybe in one of them, he was not broken.

Maybe Ben was still alive.

Maybe his mother never gave him up.

Maybe the ghosts would leave him alone.

Maybe, maybe, maybe—and if there were a hundred lives, a hundred Klaus, then he was only one of them, and that one was exactly who he was supposed to be. And in the end, it was easier to do what he had to if he could believe that somewhere else, another version of him got to make another choice. Got to live a better—or at least simpler—life. Maybe he was even sparing them. Allowing another Klaus to stay sane and safe.

Later that night, when his panic attack ceased and he managed to make the others leave him alone, Klaus snatches up a container of Tylenol he finds in the bathroom after a shower and pours its contents into the palm of his hand. It’s a foolish act of sheer rebelliousness, yet he feels it’s something he must do. All he wants is to be put out of his misery. Is that so wrong?

He can scarcely think coherently, anyway, when he drops the handful into his mouth and chokes it down with a swig from his water bottle. Falling back in his chair, he waits for a painless slumber to envelop him. Perhaps it was a reckless move, he thinks, albeit he’s too exhausted to fear anything now. He has nothing to lose at this point. When at last his eyes flutter shut, he mentally unleashes every worldly bond and idly wonders if Hell’s his next destination.

(Klaus hadn’t really considered that his means of escape is considered cowardly and sinful in regards to his former faith.)

In the morning, he awakens and vomits it all up onto the floor since he can’t make it to the toilet in time. Bile is present in his mouth, it trickles down his chin, ruining his shirt, and it’s all horrid and revolting. Klaus hugs his knees in the corner like a child and cries, sincerely wanting nothing else but to leave it all behind.

He very nearly prays, not for forgiveness, but rather for a means of curing his loneliness, his utter confusion and his suffering. He thinks of the way he’d seen people on TV do it, getting down on their knees—and he nearly imitates their example.

Yet there’s one pocketknife he stole from Diego a long time ago that gleams like gold in the yellow light, lying oh-so-conveniently on the drawer by his side. In desperation, Klaus grabs it, holds his breath, and shakily grazes the blade upon the delicate flesh underneath his hands. When he produces the first wound, he misses the thick vessel and fails to draw blood. It had been so long since he had done this, that he wonders if it’ll be any bad if he starts again. Not that he cares.

Klaus Hargreeves has nothing to lose anymore. One brother disappeared, another was dead and his other brothers were leaving as soon as they could (he pretended he didn’t see Alisson packing her bags earlier and hiding them under the bed, probably waiting for the night to come so she could sneak out without the old man seeing) so it was not like anyone cared about what he did to himself.

Through the day, Klaus relieves himself with a dozens of cigarettes and by making use of the same pocketknife on the insides of his forearms. The old man barely cared for them anymore, now that Ben was dead everyone refused to obey and follow his orders, and things were falling apart around the house. Klaus wasn’t complaining; Reginald getting a taste of his own medicine by having his “perfect superheroes” rebelling against him was one of the best unexpected things to happen.

Alisson was the first to leave.

Diego came next, and it made Klaus really consider following him.

Along with an unopened can of beer, a box of sleeping pills lies on his bedside table, Klaus cracks it open and chugs down three. After that he lights a cigarette and lies still again, brooding and drowning in trains of thought.

Nicotine and tobacco aren’t ideal panaceas for sleep. Furthermore, he never feels the effects of the pills kicking in. Klaus clings tightly to his pillow, lonesome and fatigued and ironically sick from insomnia. Vainly, he wonders if there’s any way to subdue the pain of his sorrows; though he seriously doubts it.

The idea of leaving had been on his mind ever since Alisson left (for Los Angeles, she had said, the realm of starts, the great Hollywood) and honestly, there was nothing chaining him at that house anymore so why not? Ben would nag at him (oh how he had become talkative ever since he died, Klaus was surprised) but so what? It was better than living in that hell with that bastard Reginald Hargreeves watching his back and with Luther complaining about how it was unfair for them to leave (everyone knew he was talking specifically about Alisson because, hey, they had that weird thing going on before) while he didn’t see a reason for it.

Having truthfully nothing else to do, Klaus goes to the bottom drawer of his chest to fish out an outfit that for once isn’t showy or extravagant: skinny black jeans and a plain gray t-shirt under an old, thrift store jeans jacket. He picks up the money he had been hiding under his mattress, which is not much since half of it was spent on drugs, picks up an old backpack and put some few things inside, not forgetting his pocket knife and his favorite lighter. When he leaves home, he departs without looking behind.

Diego’s car is nowhere to be seem, so Klaus sighs and start walking. Dazedly, he walks among the crowds within the lightened streets. No one appears to recognize him, the glory days of the Umbrella Academy being celebrities was left behind and buried along with his heart. The only ones who seemed to recognize them these days were old ladies who probably saw them grow up through TV and magazines until they all became mere shadows of those “children far beyond the ordinary” and the spotlight went off.

A thread of an idea fleets through his mind when he arrives at the subway station, and it’s something he’s seen in a movie. It’s quite famous: the scene of a drunk girl leaning over the tracks too far as the train is about to come. Klaus purchases a cheap, one-way ticket east from his location. Maybe he’ll pay his most recent dealer a visit, sure that Shayla will be nice enough to let him spend the night there. Or maybe he’ll remain here, leaping as soon as the train pulls in, and then no one will be there to stop him, and he won’t have to deal with anything anymore.

But what will they think? he wonders, as he’s staring at the tracks and contemplating. How will they react when they learn the truth about The Séance, formerly Number Four from Umbrella Academy; when they learn that in reality, he’s a loner who’s so insecure, he can barely stand to look at himself in the mirror?

It’s almost a dead end, but not quite. Being in such a foul mood, he figures the least he can do is go somewhere where no one will judge him for his choices. So he sits on the chair, the inside of the train almost empty except for him and maybe more three people, just as lost as he feels. There’s a presence at his side and he looks at is, giving a sad smile; Ben looks worried, almost as if he could read Klaus thoughts.

“What goes through your mind, Benny boy?” He asks, for once not caring if people think he’s crazy. He’s tired. “What worries you?”

“Are you sure leaving like this is a good idea? Shouldn’t you call, I don’t know, Diego or something?” Ben sighed. “Where are you going anyway, Klaus?”

“Ha! Our dear brothers jumped out of the boat without saying goodbye, why should I give mine to them? Don’t make me laugh. It’s not like they give a fuck about me anyway.” Klaus shrugged. “Shayla will help me though, I’m sure she’ll let me spend the night until I figure out my next move.”

“And what’s your next move? Klaus you have no money and nowhere to go! You should―”

“Oh, don’t lecture me now, Ben. What the fuck do you want me to do?! Stay in that fucking house with Luther and that old men reminding me of how much a fuck up I am?! Nah, I-I don’t need that anymore. Anything is better than that.” Klaus turned away, resting the side of his head on the glass, refusing to look at Ben. “Anywhere is better than home. Anywhere.”


End file.
